Haiku Deck is a Seattle-based startup that began in August 2012 as an iPad app delivering a simple method of creating image-rich presentations that pull Creative Commons licensed images directly from Flickr and attribute the images directly on the slides without the user having to do a single thing. Now, as an art historian by training who taught art history full-time for seven years and still uses images heavily in my work, I appreciate all tools that make CC-licensed images more accessible. But when the attribution is taken care of for me — you’ve got me!

Haiku Deck also creates a beautifully designed presentation, regardless of your own design skills. A free Haiku Deck account provides you with six themes, each which has its own font and photo filter. While the aesthetics of the design process are taken care of for you, you will soon realize that Haiku Deck is different from PowerPoint in one important other way –it minimizes the use of text. And this is a good thing, folks.

By minimizing text, the creator of the presentation must focus more heavily on using images to convey the concepts of the presentation. This is challenging — but it also engages a learner in a much different way. Images are a tremendous opportunity to engage a learner’s affective domain by triggering emotion. Yet, rather than using pictures to enhance learning, visual resources are used too often in education to repeat the content presented by an instructor. This approach is shown to actually reduce retention of content, as the learner is conflicted with listening and reading the same message (Mayer & Moreno, 2003).

Haiku Deck recently became available as a web app too for the general public! After you create a Haiku Deck, it must be “published” to the web, which will allow you to be able to retrieve the presentation from your account on the Haiku Deck web app. Haiku Decks can be exported to your computer as PDFs or Powerpoints and you can add images from your own computer (in addition to those on Flickr and additional premium images available for purchase). You may also choose between the following privacy settings for each of your Haiku Decks: private (only you), restricted (only those with the link can view it), and public (it may be found through web searches). Finally, the content you share may be embedded in other sites (like an LMS), which makes it great for teaching!